Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday November 18, 2010 @01:16PM
from the fruit-pop dept.

Darryl Alexander of Southfield, Mi. claims that a lid from an exploding jar of Del Monte fruit knocked him unconscious. Since this is an unacceptable way to get one of your 2-4 recommended daily servings, he decided to sue Del Monte and Kroger where he bought the explosive jar. Both companies deny any responsibility but have offered the sore jawed Alexander $150k to settle the suit. "It happened so fast. I just had no time to react. ... I staggered, lost consciousness and fell to the floor. I eventually screamed for my wife," he said.

This is trying to cover medical and time off work, plus a little, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the McDonald's coffee debacle. The man can prove that he was injured, and the jar contributed to his injuries. Del Monte and Kroger are just trying to prevent a PR nightmare with a relatively small (for the companies involved) sum of cash.

I think they should have fought it. Yes, sometimes it sucks when lawsuits come and people can't afford to go to court with it, sometimes, like this time, the person is so retarded to where they deserve nothing, and it shows the retards that you can't up and sue for everything. If they wanted to, there would be no way he could even begin to keep up with court costs against Kroger. All it would take is seeing if the bottle actually had opening directions or "do not shove bottle in your eyeball hole" precau

That's not what happened, judging from TFA. He ran it under warm water, a common technique to open stuck jars, the goal being to heat up the lid to make it expand a little and not be so tight (or maybe heat up the interior of the jar to increase the pressure, making the lid easier to take off). He hit the lid with the rubber end of a screwdriver, another common remedy (I guess the idea is to break the seal on the lid and allow the inside of the jar to equalize with the outside). I've done the same thing

Just a quick note: does a jar of del monte fruit actually have opening instructions? If not how can there be a prescribed manner of opening? I would say the prescribed manner in such a case would be any manner used by any non-trivial number of people. Such as running warm water over it and tapping the edge of the lid (which a LOT of people do to open stuck jars).

I have no idea. I've never bought del Monte fruit.But I have seen packets of food that have a warning label that says "Caution: Contents will be hot after heating" and on a packet of peanuts, "Caution: Contains Nuts".

Actually, its well known some types of food contaminations can create gases within its storage vessel. Cans are well known to bloat and distort in shape. If its a glass container it can burst or "explode" fairly forcefully since it can't give until critical failure. Handling such a container is likely to encourage structural failure if its already near the breaking point.

If the guy is simply not attempting to commit fraud with his claim, its very likely the food was contaminated with something. If so, its p

The guy claimed the lid came off with enough force to render him unconscious. Considering the lids to those jars weigh probably 10g at most, how fast would it have to travel to hit him hard enough to be knocked out? I'm betting at least a few hundred m/s. Wanna bet that the force required to propel the lid at such a velocity already would have blown the glass jar into shards long before he tried to open it?

Well, quick google search indicates you need about 300kg to knock somebody out. In other words about 3000 newton. So lets leave acceleration out of the question at first and simply look at the pressure required to generate such a force. Lets assume the jar has a 5cm radius. So the surface area of the lid would be about 0.0078 cm^2 in other words (don't have a calculator at hand so could make mistakes on the math). And since pressure is force on surface area we can assume it'll take about 3.8 bar of pressure